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Solarium

1
 
               And daybreak! The sun
sitting up—
 
               Oh God 
               I thought I saw God spread out 
               in the roses again—
 
Momentarily, 
I will be taken up 
like flame in a cloud like a cinder in fire 
                              to outflap the empyrean—
 
Dead things gumming the sidewalk. 
Hello, 
                  dead things. 
 
Tell me: What good is a life that wears away? 
 
2
 
I chew the red wire, 
                         then the blue wire. 
Then through the flowered wallpaper—
  
Oh! Look at this charming table: 
already set; built for a mouse; 
 
and silent as a banquet hall 
after the guests have gone.  
 
3
 
I was a dead thing once.  
 
On the back porch once—
               facing the square 
of my mother’s rose-
               garden, with the northfacing windows 
full-opened in June, and other flowers, 
               the names I’ve forgotten, all gone 
into bloom, 
               I’ve heard the train horn bawl out again 
from across the river, first sound 
               I remember, tolled 
thru the walls of an empty house, 
 
have watched the coyotes come loping 
over across these frost-flocked rows of the field—
 
4
 
‘Quick—to the window, Mother 
come see—the coyote 
he’s dragging a haunch by the bone.’ 
 
He’ll lay it down, lie down 
beside it, then sink 
his teeth in the flitch.  
 
5
 
The dream is big, the dream is fancy: 
The dream is big and fancy. 
The rodent: cuddly; but a little dirty. 
I’ll keep him as a pet, I’ll pet him like 
a luck-charm—
 
6
 
Remember summer, Jordan? 
Eating quinces, spitting the seeds? 
And how you never ate quinces again 
when they laughed when you called them quinces? 
And now there are no more quinces? 
 
I do remember quinces. 
 
7
 
Beautiful ones—I see you everywhere.  
Hiding inside yourselves
 
8
 
Sometimes time is iron. Swing it hard
hear it whoosh.  
 
9
 
At the door, the red curtain is still flapping.  
Who will go in? 
 
The one who is going 
is going. 
 
No, I do not die here.  
The year is wrong. 
 
Earth returns 
and today no cloud cover. 
 
I wish my heart was as big as the world, 
but bigger—  
 
10
 
The sun sitting up 
               ever so slowly—